Saturday, March 6, 2010

“ What is in a name? ”, said William Shakespeare andwent on to add thatcalled by any other name , the rose would smell as sweet. I am afraid not many would agree with him today, because there is every thing in a name and as they say in Hindi- Naam bikta hai.

Take any thing- from a toothbrush to an expensive car - the manufacturers vie with one anotherto woothe customer and coax him/her intopurchasing the product throughmassive advertisements andpublicity campaign. Little wonder then that in any production house or manufacturing concern, a sizable amount of budget is kept aside for advertisement and publicity, as without this the amount spent onR & Dwillnotbe able toproduce the desired results in terms of sales and returns.

We have seen names of places being changed sometimes on well founded historical, cultural or religious reasons. So we have seen Bombay being changed to Mumbai, Calcutta to Kolkata,Madras city to Chennai ,Madras state toTamilnadu. Pondicherry toPuducherry, Trivendrum to Thiruananthapuram ………….so on and so forth.In case of my hometown, there was a smooth transition from the “British” Simlato Shimla- the way it isspelt and sounds in Hindi.

But of late or rather for quite some years now, some people, especially celebrities , on the advice of some experts-astrologists and numerologistshave developed a fad fornew spellings for their names , by inserting a letter or two to the name or surname, as the case may be. Sowe haveSonu Nigampreferring to be called Sonu Nigaam , Shobha Decalling herselfShobhaa De. No doubt we have names spelt as Rakeysh Omprakash Mehraetc etc. Whatboosthas their changed namegiven tothesecelebrities in terms of success and well being, only they can tell.

In my school days , Ionce planned togo for more fashionable“ Romesh ” instead ofthe verycommon“ Ramesh "- a la an actor of Hindi cinema. Butas it turned out, our Hinditeacher , known for his sense of humour oncetalkingcasually out of contextheld " Ramesh " to beOK as Rama + eesh could mean Shiv or Vishnu and added that “ Romesh "split intoRom + eesh could onlymean a bear or aBhaloo- witha body covered withhair ,as " Rom "in Hindi means a strandof hair. This made me stick to the name “ Ramesh " however old fashionedor common it appears !